Month: July 2015

Primary care practice stands on the precipice of radical transformation as emphasis shifts from offering volume-based to value-based care. Look no further than the recent Supreme Court ruling to see that the ACA and its mission are becoming further cemented into the U.S. healthcare system. The goals are lofty: higher quality and greater access to healthcare at a lower cost. For most, it’s hard to imagine what this healthcare landscape will look like in the future.

But Gil Addo, the CEO and founder of the NYC- and Boston-based healthcare startup RubiconMD, seems to know. His novel vision of the future involves shaking up the traditional model of primary and specialty care practice in medicine.

A Yale and Harvard Business School graduate, Addo’s experience as a consultant and in commercializing innovation has included industry stints at both large and small tech and biotech companies. In early 2013 he met co-founders Dr. Julien Pham, a physician formerly on faculty at Harvard Medical School, and Carlos Reines, another Harvard MBA.

As of December 2014, they have raised over $1.4 million funding and support from major investors, including athenahealth and Waterline Ventures.

We sat down with Addo recently to talk about this innovative company and discuss his plans for the future.

Tell us about what you do at RubiconMD.

RubiconMD is meant to enhance access and bring appropriate specialist expertise into the primary care setting. The patients will see their primary care providers and whatever the issue is–if it is outside the PCP’s expertise and results in a referral—the physician can upload any relevant information, such as images, labs, and studies, and ask questions. We figure out who the most appropriate specialist is and then route the case to them so that they can respond within a few hours.

That’s the crux of the entire interaction. It’s a clinician-to-clinician electronic consult.

How did you get the inspiration to start RubiconMD?

I was very interested in this problem of enhancing access and wanted to find a way to solve it. I had a personal experience that motivated me to take this on. I had a grandmother who had to travel thousands of miles to Boston for treatment of a brain tumor, and then back and forth for all the follow-up. Why couldn’t her local provider oversee her care with appropriate support? There had to be a better way.

I traveled to India and looked at different healthcare delivery models and found that better way. There they have an extreme version of what you see everywhere: the appropriate expertise is in a concentrated area and people are everywhere else, so they bring the appropriate expertise into community health centers.

I started iterating on that model and borrowed things from other settings until I arrived at a solution that fit the U.S. healthcare market. RubiconMD allows increased access to the right specialist and brings that expertise into the primary care setting, to the front line.

How did you figure out if this might be something that primary care physicians would actually be interested in?

Once we figured out that the idea made sense at a system level, we had to figure out if this was a solution that physicians would use. Julien brought his clinical expertise and introduced the idea of “curbside” interaction, an informal and natural way that physicians interact with each other. We were able to validate the model on a small scale and see that physicians would actually use it and find value.

We ran a larger scale pilot to see if this would save people money. We used two large clinics with a panel of specialists and ran it across 15 or so specialties. The findings have been remarkably consistent.

In a third of the time, this support avoids a specialist visit. This has been consistent across all deployments and different populations.

Another third of the time this process improves the referral. You’re able, even though you’re referring, to send along the appropriate labs and studies and waste less time. And you make sure the patient goes to the right specialist.

For the remaining third of the time, it’s peace of mind. It validates what you were going to do.

The cost savings is from improving care outcomes and avoiding duplicate and inefficient use of resources. Almost $300/per opinion is saved, aside from other benefits such us reducing wait time and avoiding ancillary costs to patients.

Is this billable to insurance?

It is not. Right now, we work with value-based organizations incented to provide high quality primary care in the most affordable way possible who see this as a way to extend their capabilities, provide better and more timely care in the primary care setting and avoid unnecessary services.

Payers show interest, as this is a great tool to enhance outcomes and reduce costs while improving patient satisfaction.

What are the challenges that you’re having?

No shortage of challenges. We focus on the sphere of healthcare that is value-based and incented to provide high quality care at the lowest cost. But U.S. healthcare still has a very large fee-for-service component and the biggest challenge is that we’re dealing with so many groups fighting themselves. It’s a system in transition. We’re trying to bring this into that environment and show them how we help them transition. It’s tough but enough of the market has moved and enough changes in primary care have happened that we have been able to gain momentum quickly.

What are your next goals, short-term and long-term?

Short term, we want to continue better servicing our customers, provide better tools to meet their needs and fit even better into workflow. We’re obsessed with enhancing workflow and not making additional work — providing a tool that syncs with the way physicians want to practice medicine.

Long term, we’re focused on the idea of democratizing medical expertise. As our longer-term vision, we want this to be the default. We want people to think of RubiconMD as the way to get high quality consults more efficiently and locally so that there’s no barrier for clinical expertise.